To Boston, with love

3:26 PM,
Apr. 17, 2013

Written by

E.J. DIONNE JR.

Boston is tough and sentimental, traditional and forward-looking, working class and wealthy, parochial and global, warm and reserved, reform-minded and unreformable, restrained and boisterous, superstitious and free-thinking, very new and very old.

Boston is the plain, practical three-decker houses of Southie, Dorchester and Jamaica Plain and the elegant Federal-style row houses of Beacon Hill and Back Bay. Great hospitals and high tech coexist with a blue-collar ethos.

Boston is forgiving but relishes grudges. It values loyalty, sometimes to a fault - and rejects the idea that ...